cletus

So if I am reading this correctly if you are currently on an iPhone 6 lease there is no early upgrade.

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The way I read it is that my wife has an Iphone 5. She turns that in and gets an Iphone 6. If she then upgrades to the new Iphone 6s that comes out this year she can keep the $15/mo cost with the new phone.

This just dropped....

 

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Sprint Launches iPhone Forever

 

Join the iPhone Forever Revolution. Upgrade your iPhone ANYTIME, it’s included in your monthly rate. Get your iPhone for just $22/mo. Anytime you don't have the latest, you are eligible to upgrade! For a limited time, get this special offer for $15/mo!

 

Limited Time Offer: Bring us any smartphone to trade-in and your regular monthly rate is reduced to just $15 until your next upgrade. But HURRY, if you get your iPhone 6 and upgrade before December 31 that upgrade doesn't stop your discount – it continues all the way until your next upgrade!

 

How it Works:

• Get your iPhone 6 before 9/10.
• Send us your working smartphone within 30 days. (we'll provide the postage).
• Trade in your iPhone 6 for the latest iPhone no later than 12/31.

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The Newsroom Release has a great price chart which compares it with offers from the other carriers.

 

The $15/month pricing is for an iPhone 6 (16 GB) on a 22 month lease with a trade-in of a smartphone. (Sprint also offers a 21 month lease on this program at different pricing)

 

The 24 month lease is not part of this program.

 

Very interesting! I will definitely consider as my Wife's birthday is coming up (and it will mean a good excuse for me to upgrade to the new Nexus 5 when it comes out....)

I seem to be in the minority if you go by reddit comments, etc but I really like the look of this phone.

Either way, because of Brightstar, I doubt that Marcelo's bank account will be hurting.

 

These guys must love money -- or the pursuit of money.

 

As I work in education, I make less than $50,000 per year.  But I have the time and money to do what I want to do -- such as research and write for S4GRU.  Even if I made 100 times my earnings, I do not think I would live my life that differently.  Maybe I would just buy every handset released, set up my own RF testing lab, and publish the results for free.

 

AJ

I do program management at an RF engineering company where we primarily work with radars (government contracts obviously). The RF test setup some of our end customers have is simply insane. Racks of $200k a pop test equipment with every option. I am confident I would never be able to make enough to replicate those setups in multiple lifetimes.

These verizon plans are absolute crap. 

12 GB with 4 lines is $160 BEFORE the cost of new phones. I mean jesus with new phones you might be looking at another $100 a month!

I mean, I get that it is a rock solid network blah blah but still that seems incredibly costly for the amount of data you get.

Counterpoints:  the $350 2013 Nexus 5 and $400 2015 Moto X.

 

AJ

Totally agree. After I bought my Nexus 5 I realized that a good phone doesnt mean it has to be a $600 phone these days. The new Moto G is actually looking incredible for the price point it is at ($219 for the 16 GB model? Review here

I look forward to the new Nexus 5 that is coming out too.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/7/9116493/verizon-is-doing-away-with-contracts

Getting rid of contracts and going to shared data is an unexpected move from Verizon.. I thought they would hold on to contracts until the end of time.

So the leasing company Sprint and Softbank will set up is supposed to arrange and finance handset leasing. The leasing company operates at net 0 profit but will take a significant load of payments off of Sprint's books thereby creating + free cash flow.

Masa had said that he did this with Softbank and it has worked very well for his company.

 

That's what I got from the financial part of the transcript. Did I interpret it correctly?

That is how I understood it as well. Neat and tidy.

BTW for anyone wanting to read the transcript:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3397085-sprint-s-r-marcelo-claure-on-q1-2015-results-earnings-call-transcript

if it prompts you to login:

Username: fabskxha@guerrillamail.com

Pass: bugmenot

Slightly off topic but has anyone else been going longer between phone upgrades or is it just me and my friends/are we just getting old?

I used to get a new smartphone every year or so but now I am still on my Nexus 5 and my wife is on her iphone 5 and we are pretty happy. I guess for me there are diminishing returns for the expense of a new phone. My only real want is a better camera but my N5 has what I consider decent battery life.

The N6 didn't hold my interest long due to price and size but maybe the next N5 will be something that I get. Maybe my buying habits have just permanently changed now that I am not getting subsidized phones and instead buying them outright so I've become more price conscious.

Help me, Nexus Kenobi.  You're my only hope.

 

AJ

Nexus 2015: Return of the LG.

I hope the new Nexus will be priced around this range. I love my Nexus 5 and when I tried the Nexus 6 I just didn't like the size or the price of it. 

He sent off a whole chain. I've assembled it below.

 

I am so tired of your Uncarrier bullshit when you are worse than the other two carriers together. Your cheap misleading lease imitation is a joke. You trick people to believe that they have a 15 dollar iphone lease payment when it's not true. You tell them they can upgrade up to 3x but you don't tell them the price goes up to 27 dollars when they do. You say one thing but behave completely different. It's all a fake show. So its really #Tmobilelikehell

 

Weird that I had to edit the quote for this to show up ^

Anyways, my sister actually has this issue and is probably coming to Sprint over it. Mostly I think she is pissed because the vast, vast majority of people will be slightly annoyed at this bait and switch but deal with it because moving carriers is more than $12/mo of hassle for many people. She doesn't see it that way and I think once she figures out her exact employer discount will be coming onboard with Sprint.

Uncarrier my ass.

This doesn't really impact me as I can use my work VPN to bypass this stupid limit. The real problem is WHY was this even considered? At least make it 5 MB down so people can do HD Netflix

Even then imposing a limit is still stupid as hell. Netflix and Youtube are honestly incredibly bandwidth efficient. The quality you can get on Netflix at recommended for HD levels is awesome!

I don't even want to update the pricing spreadsheet with this abortion of a plan.

In an effort to promote discussion:

Why is carrier aggregation important for Sprint? Doesn't Sprint have tons of spectrum to work with? Don't get me wrong, I am for sure excited for higher speeds as most of my usage tends to be burst downloads when i tether my laptop to my phone when I am in the field (12 GB this month!   ) so anything that saves me a few moments is just extra icing on the cake.

Will it help edge case issues such as dropping to 3g in a low LTE signal area/or help speeds in low LTE signal areas? When I am on the outskirts of a cell here in Austin (which has GREAT LTE coverage) I can see some very slow speeds still.

Or is this mainly to help the above case I described by throwing more available bandwidth at people? How does this help when for Sprint I feel that it would still be limited by backhaul in many cases?

Thanks ahead of time for any clarification.

So where do we talk about carrier aggregation excitement?

This is probably the one thing that will make me upgrade my Nexus 5 and my wife's phone as well. Austin is a fantastic Sprint market except for very, very small pockets where you get kicked to 3g (usually doing airplane mode on/off kicks you back to a weak lte signal). 

All things considered I will probably re-up with Sprint in the future.

I moved to Sprint because of the deals they offered on the shared data plans. When my promotional rate expires I will re-evaluate and go from there.

I've always been a Sprint fan and even though I left Sprint I only went to Ting because the Sprint network wasn't worth the plans they were charging. Now the network is great and seems fully fleshed out.

Unfortunately that has definitely taken some of the fun out of being on S4GRU because now I don't really have any questions about why the network is slow or why I can't get LTE everywhere. The only hitch I have is my wife's iphone 5 only gets 1 LTE band so she isn't as impressed by the turnaround as I am on my Nexus 5.

I am still happy with my Nexus 5. It runs great and never had an issue. My only complaint would be the terrible speaker and poor camera but for the price at launch it was a great deal.

cool chart!

Now that exactly 100 users have been polled, here are some other interesting stats.  Again using the median value in each data tier, the top five percent consumes 367.5 GB per month; the bottom 95 percent consumes 857.5 GB per month.  That brings the total to 1225 GB -- of which the top five percent accounts for exactly 30 percent.

 

AJ

I find it kind of interesting that the results are not skewed higher. I figured S4GRU would be on the higher end with most users above 5GB and quite a bit more in the 15 GB+ range. I won't be changing my plan but it does give me a bit of pause for next time I re-up.

3 things happened here: 1) I went from a position where I met vendors to a higher up position where I no longer have to 2) We got fiber internet and gigabit wifi at work and 3) my wife was at home on bedrest and then the baby came in March (neat to see the spike from the hospital stay as the wifi was terrible there). I avg about 50-75 GB+/mo over WiFi now.

Happily I only pay $88 after taxes for the 24 GB shared plan (+4 GB from that promotion) because I expect to be upwards of 8 GB per month when my wife goes back to work. Streaming music adds up quick!

Is there a family plan option?

There are no family plan options. That is why everyone hates the pricing.

I don't see how this is realistic.  The effective minimum bill (with miniscule data use) is $21/mo.  Over two years that's only a $504 outlay.  If we assume the Nexus 5 was sold at cost like many sources say it was, that means Google only makes $150 over two years on this customer on the actual service.   The prices may be off a bit on the data at $10/GB, but they're definitely not going to be giving away a device that costs them $350, let alone over $500 to make.  The data prices need to go down the more you use, or something more realistic.

Sure but I bet the average user is probably at like 2-3GB which probably puts it at $40ish which is $960. Even if they are between your estimates and my estimates then Google does alright. They don't have any physical network to support or huge outlays of capital here and if we are honest this doesn't appear to be something Google is super heavily invested in going forward. 

You know, if everyone using this got a free Nexus device then the pricing would be good. 

Today is the day:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/22/8467433/google-launches-mobile-service

https://fi.google.com/about/

Nexus 6 only, $20 base charge, $10 per GB charge that is prorated if you don't use the full GB.

Data rates the same around the world, international calling 20c/min

A resounding meh from me. My current Sprint plan is far, far better and this is beaten by a ton of MVNOs. The international stuff is cool I guess but I really only travel to Mexico once every 2-3 years so this won't be a huge draw for me. Even then I could just grab a t-mobile sim and use my phone (nexus 5) anyways.

My guess is that this will be offered in Google Fiber cities only.